Chapter 7 Above #2
Like a crude rendering of a hand—-and around the marks, something has been dabbed. Blood, I think, but of course it isn’t—-blood would have turned brown out here. It’s paint, smeared roughly around the shape.
I walk toward Emily. Her brows draw together, and then she startles as I reach out, fit my hand over the carved mark.
I’ve never seen a mark like this. It isn’t part of the story, but isn’t that what the story is?
Something each of us tells, changes, makes our own.
It isn’t real, so it can be real to each of us the way we want it to be.
“She was here,” I say, and the words are more certain than I possibly can be.
“Are you sure?”
I scrape at the paint with the edge of my fingernail. A bit of it flakes off. “This isn’t fresh, but it isn’t years old, either,” I note. I turn to Emily. “Someone hurt her. That’s what this means. Doesn’t it? If she was calling on Jenny Red--Hands.”
“Do you think she still had a gentle heart?” Emily asks, and there’s something rough in her voice. Her hands hang loose at her sides, her gaze fixed unerringly on me.
“That isn’t funny,” I say.
“No,” she agrees. Her head tilts. “You aren’t going to find what you’re looking for out here, Audrey. It’s been too long, if she was ever here at all.”
“We should keep looking,” I insist.
“For what?” she asks flatly, and I flinch.
“I don’t know. I just—-there’s something here. There has to be.”
Her expression shifts, softens. She shakes her head a little, loosing drops of rain. “It’s cold. It’s wet. Come have some coffee,” she suggests. “If there’s a trail out here, it went cold a long time ago. This isn’t where you need to be looking.”
I want to argue, but she’s right. Wherever Meghan Vale went, I won’t find her by traipsing around in the trees. I need to find out why she was so fascinated with the story of Jenny Red--Hands.
I dip my head in surrender. We walk in silence back to the house. We shed our muddy coats and boots at the door, and Emily offers me a towel for my dripping hair.
Everything about the house feels old and out of date—-the wood--paneled walls, the coral carpet, the musty smell of it. It reminds me nonspecifically of my grandparents, though I can’t quite place why. Maybe just the sense that I am welcome, but only reluctantly welcome.
Most of the surfaces have some kind of potted plant on them.
Succulents clustered on the mantel, a peace lily spreading its wings by the front window, spider plants making a tangle of the coffee table.
Books are abandoned precariously at the edges of surfaces, as if set down in the middle of reading and never picked up again.
The bookmarks sticking out of them are eclectic—-envelopes and scraps of paper and pens and bobby pins.
There are no photographs on any of the walls, but paintings hang here and there.
Nature paintings, mostly—-not landscapes, but collage--like paintings of mushrooms growing from logs, the blue folds of a stream, and a decaying leaf; or else the pebbled back of a toad, an acorn cap, a twist of bark.
Pieces brought together into a cohesive but surreal whole.
I’m examining one when Emily returns from the kitchen, two mugs in hand.
She passes one over to me and follows my gaze.
The painting in front of me is a view of a hillside—-a scrape of grass and rocks giving way to thickly wooded slope, which spills into a tumble of wilderness beyond.
A rust--brown rock protrudes at the bottom frame, the edge flat and worn. I know it well.
“Eden Crest, right?” I ask. She hums an affirmative. “I go up there all the time,” I say, turning back to look at it. “We used to sit up there and pretend we were going to run away into the woods. Walk right through and be totally different people on the other side.”
“ ‘We’?”
“Janie and me,” I clarify, and she nods thoughtfully.
“I can see that. Sitting there, it feels like you could just start walking and vanish,” Emily says.
“You probably could,” I say. She gives me a questioning look. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to disappear.”
“Like Meghan Vale?” Emily asks.
But she isn’t who I’m thinking of. I clear my throat a little. “Is it yours?” I ask. “The painting, I mean.” At her nod, my eyebrows raise in appreciation. “I never asked what you do for a living.”
“This,” she says, ticking her chin toward the painting. “I sell them now and then. It’s not much, but I don’t need much.”
“I’m impressed,” I say. “I was never artistic enough to amount to anything, but I always wanted to be.”
“It’s all a matter of practice,” she demurs.
“Not all of it,” I counter. “I don’t have the eye. Or the creative spirit.”
“Who told you that?” she asks, quietly probing.
I flush, because the answer is Janie. Janie, showing off her own top marks in art class.
Looking over my own sketchbook with a careless disinterest. You know, she said, you have the diligence to learn the technical skills in a way I can’t.
That’s the tragedy of art. That busy bee, worker attitude and talent are so rarely found in the same person.
She was the talent, of course. She never let me doubt that.
“Tell me about her,” Emily says.
“That’s hard.”
“Why?” she asks. She wanders over to the couch and settles onto it, sitting cross--legged. I take up a perch on the opposite end.
“Janie was my best friend,” I say. “But I didn’t like her very much.” The words feel disloyal, even after all this time, but Emily’s expression holds no judgment. The mug warms my palms. The coffee smells strong, tastes thick and bitter. I drink deeply. “We were friends for three years.”
“Not that long,” Emily notes.
“An eternity when you’re twelve.”
She makes a soft noise, understanding. “Why did you stop being friends?”
“Homecoming,” I say.
“Because she ditched you?”
“No. Because of what happened after,” I say. I’d been asleep for hours when Janie showed up. That night, I let her in. She crawled through the window stinking of alcohol, laughing at the look on my face.
“You’re so boring,” she’d complained. Called me uptight, a baby, all the things I was afraid I was.
“Live a little,” she told me. I asked her what she’d done with Andrew Hill, what they’d gotten up to, and she piled her hair on top of her head, wiggled her shoulders suggestively. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
No, I decided, I wouldn’t. I’d turned away, told her to go. Instead, she flopped onto my bed, her dress hiking up around her thighs and falling off her shoulder. Makeup made smoky rings around her eyes. “You wouldn’t even know what to do if a boy kissed you,” she teased.
“I don’t even want to,” I’d made the mistake of telling her.
“Oh my gosh, Oddity, are you a lesbian? Are you in love with me? Do you want to kiss me?” Eyes big and a smirk on her lips. “Oddity. You’re in love with me, aren’t you?”
I don’t know why that was the last wound I was willing to suffer. Maybe because I wasn’t sure she was wrong. Or maybe it was only the smugness. That ugly smile, that hideous laugh. I screamed at her to get out. I told her that I never wanted to talk to her again.
“You’ll come crawling back. You always do,” she said before she left.
But I didn’t. She wouldn’t stoop to making amends, ever.
Normally I was the one who tried to fix things, and then she would act like she’d forgotten about the whole thing.
But this time, I didn’t bend. And then it had been a month and then two, and I sank deeper and deeper into a depression but never broke.
Never begged. By the next fall, life had rearranged itself.
I’d met Len. I’d stopped thinking about Janie every second of every day.
And then, suddenly, she was gone altogether.
I tell Emily some of this. Bits and pieces, the parts that I can hold without scouring my skin with their touch.
“She sounds awful,” Emily says.
“She was.” I sigh. “And she wasn’t. You have to understand, her life was hard, and she was young.”
“Is that an excuse?”
“She deserved a chance to change,” I say, and Emily has no rebuttal to that.
I look down at the rapidly cooling coffee.
“I fantasize sometimes that one day I’ll find her, and she’ll be different.
That she’ll have grown into some new thing.
Still wild, but gentle, too. Someone who can wield her sharp edges only when she means to.
I wouldn’t have to talk to her. I wouldn’t have to tell a soul where she was, if she didn’t want me to. But I’d know.”
“And if you can’t find her, Meghan Vale will do.” It feels like an insult. It feels like being called out, but she’s so calm about it.
I stare at her, unable to summon up an answer.
“I never really had friends,” Emily says, shifting her weight. “I could never get the hang of it. Keeping people around long enough.”
“You weren’t in school, were you? After that year,” I say.
“My father decided it was better to homeschool me,” she says. “He thought he could handle my particular needs better than the government. He would have pulled Liam and Andrew, too, except Andrew had football and Liam had theater. So it was just me and Dad.”
I look at her uncertainly. “How was that?”
“Formative,” she says with a hook of a smile I can’t read at all. The air thrums with the intensity of her, for all that she is relaxed and loose--limbed there on the couch.
My mother once called me a cup, easy to fill.
Said I let others spill into me. Like Janie.
Like Emily, I think, and how she seeps into every available molecule of the air.
Yes—-at another time in my life, I think Emily would be a person who would spill into me so completely it would feel for a while as if there were no difference.
It’s only then that I realize that during our conversation, I’ve failed to register the sound of tires on gravel.